# Omata

- **Event:** [Meta Global AI Developer Hackathon](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon)
- **When:** Oct 26, 12:00 PM – Nov 4, 9:00 PM (EST)
- **Where:** Online
- **Team:** [stanley okafor](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/omataAi)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/stanley07/OmataAI
- **Demo video:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lujL2mk4KEA
- **Gallery:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon/hackathon/gallery
- **Page:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/3631

**Omata AI — A WhatsApp-Native Operating System for African Small Businesses**

Across Nigeria, millions of small merchants run their businesses with handwritten notebooks, informal records, and everyday conversations. Omata AI is building a simpler alternative: manage business operations directly through WhatsApp, without requiring merchants to learn complicated accounting software.

**The Solution**

Omata AI combines conversational bookkeeping, inventory management, customer balance tracking, and a merchant oversight dashboard. Its central design principle is human-approved financial automation: AI-assisted workflows should prepare transactions, but merchants must explicitly approve financial changes.

**What Works Today**

Our cloud-hosted system has demonstrated real incoming WhatsApp messages through Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform, authenticated signed webhooks, message deduplication, secure merchant-owner login and phone enrollment, and genuine interactive Approve/Reject buttons delivered to a real device.

The merchant dashboard and WhatsApp receiver run as containerized services on a cloud VPS, independently of the developer's computer.

**Technical Architecture**

Built with Python, Docker, persistent SQLite storage, Meta WhatsApp Business APIs, tenant-aware authentication, signed webhook verification, and an auditable financial review design. Transactions are designed to remain drafts until explicit human confirmation.

Our isolated staging validation has demonstrated a confirmed financial posting and corresponding inventory deduction exactly once. The full production WhatsApp approval-to-financial-posting workflow is still undergoing final integration and has not been represented as production-verified.

**Impact and Vision**

Omata AI aims to make reliable digital business records accessible to underserved Nigerian and African SMEs through a familiar communication interface. Planned extensions include multilingual voice understanding, expanded merchant onboarding, intelligent inventory insights, receivables management, and business analytics.

Our mission: bring the benefits of AI-powered business operations to merchants while keeping financial control in human hands.

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